Imagine silence and solitude firm as bread.
Imagine hunger cutting first slice, first breath.
Imagine silence answering each syllable back.
Imagine, alone, around, yourself the only sound.
from Richard Tipping’s “Instant History” Read More »
Between the wooden slats of the boardwalk distant lights of houses blur in a diffraction of amber like Venus through drizzle or in the curve of waves fanning from shore
from “Riversalt” by Lou Smith Read More »
the colonists always pack old spectres and memory, mad apparition, peers through cracks in day
we scatter into, our words ascending across air… and once that’s out, silence
fllas like love, but permanent, empires lying dormant (unstuffed toys) we’ll kiss the photographs flat when gone
while wrong-headed statues promise nothing yet to the gods new foregrounds arrive, unrecognizable
from Dan Disney’s “Mannequins Guide to Utopias” Read More »
The bay’s silk curtain is blue milk, draped from the opposite shore the sea pricked out in boats their white sails dancing upon its pleats through the spyglass he scanned the coves, the inlets, their crescent smiles and across to Eden a Stink, the whale bones lying about covered by feeding crows
Framed in a high window he might look like a wandering ghost his skin freckled, weathered his eyes pink-rimmed, lips dry, salt-glistered a struggle climbing up seabirds caterwauling round his head he grasped his broad-leafed hat lest the wind snatch it for the ocean and show his thinning pate
Toward the spindrift-blurred horizon, something in him yearning always had, since boyhood he’d built a port, a place with his rules and his own currency though all was against him − the weather! lack of labour, the laws! Not his fault his ventures have collapsed suddenly, he was bored
Sea eagles were circling an aeronaut, he might fly away but could only climb down a servant came forth with his carriage helped him up, awkwardly he glanced at himself in his mirror slicked down his balding crown he, who felt himself a personage was he still comme il faut?
Along the ship-wrecked coast hidden vessels drift beneath the waves octopuses’ gardens huddle in the weed-furred rotting hulls in deep green whale-strong swells he made for the Pacific Islands dragging his submerged selves plotting a republic, a land grab sailed to his secret death
The scorched tower still stands its headland now fire-razed, scalped of scrub tourists potter about pause before the signage − warped, melted and will it be replaced? the tower’s cordoned off − they ignore pose, in its emptiness watch the waves slam vermilion rock below treacherous cliffs
Wind mouths the lone tower tourists speculate − these sandstone blocks carried miles, from Sydney by bullock train, at enormous cost who was Benjamin Boyd? a colonial Christopher Skase? but more, a blackbirder wrought death, disease on his captured men indifferent to their fate
Matting the headland now green and juicy growth − wattle, myrtles spring out of charcoal ground fire has revealed the middens, the shells crumbling to ashy earth signs of those whose place it was, and is the romance is fading listen − other voices are speaking a new naming begins
from “What the river told me” by Jane Skelton Read More »
After that first urgent kissing at the door and all the prearrangements
whispered down the phone and all that splendid disarray of clothes,
the interplay of skins and liquids, that short delirium of smells and all such pure
antiphonal delights the cigarettes are lit at last … and sprawled there in a
twist of sweat a conversation comes to life: obsessions of the absent husband,
shortfalls of the absent wife.
from Geoff Page’s “Codicil” Read More »
veils sails or waves never will abolish the porthole
neither cataract nor tears ever will abolish the retina
a throw of flowers never will abolish sorrow
from Dominique Hecq and Béatrice Machet’s “Crypto” Read More »
I have died once or twice before, I believe, for the motherland and the nation. Or so I thought, initially, giving up my ghost ravaged by a youthful imbecility, bordering on an ecstasy, akin to that of the nincompoop and anorexic saints, painted willy-nilly on church walls. These deaths were as senseless as their so-called intercessions for me.
from Daniel Ionita’s “Short Bursts of Eternity” Read More »
long summer afternoon children in a village house make music shouting into a fan
from Candy Tang Ting’s “Barefoot Running” Read More »
This bedsit is home to a country boy. Buses or cabs rarely drop passengers off: the street-side trees so still that crows roost here, the gutter full of cigarette butts and used frangers.
I go chocolate shopping on my own, smoke joints in the park with my girlfriend. And in this little flat? Books piled high on my bedside table with the Chinese landscape print.
from Greg McLaren’s “After Han Shan” Read More »
on a day like this a cool glass of beer calls me to sit on the beach at sunset feeling the waves in my head rocking with the sea
a movement bringing me back to my mother’s womb when she walked up the hill her steps carrying both of us
all seems faraway nineteen fifty-seven and nineteen eighty-five
I see her only in winter now wake up in the middle of the night hearing her snore in the room next to mine
when we reached the dam after she marked down the water level I breathed then that contained river replied with a ripple from its dark
from Iris Fan Xing’s “South of Words” Read More »
